A blog about UK housing, Latin America, migration and the environment

Despite the violent protests of a year ago, Managua has largely returned to normal. While never the most attractive capital city in Latin America, it remains one of the safest. There are more police on the streets than there were before last year’s violence, but most people find that reassuring. A recent opinion poll shows that the government maintains close to 60% support and that 85% of Nicaraguans would oppose any return to last year’s protests. Nevertheless, if you buy a newspaper, you’ll find it full of anti-government rhetoric. If you watch TV news, there’s a good chance you’ll find the same. According to the world-wide Committee to Protect Journalists, opposition media are in a stronger position than they were before the crisis.

But this is far from the picture painted in the UK by the Channel 4 series ‘Unreported World’.

Right to Buy continues to fiercely divide opinion. Here, John Perry argues why he believes calling time on the 40-year-old policy is now the sensible thing to do

Here’s a good question for a pub quiz: what was Britain’s biggest ever privatisation? Was it British Gas, or perhaps water or electricity? All of these raised more than £5bn each but neither was the biggest. Perhaps, surprisingly, the answer can be found in table 60 of the annual UK Housing Review. The correct answer is, of course, the Right to Buy, which has so far raised over £55bn across England, Wales and Scotland and dwarfs all of the other privatisations.

A reflection on Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the rise of the new imperialism, by Greg Grandin, published in 2006 and updated in 2010.

So many books have been written about US intervention in Latin America that, when this one was published a decade ago, it might easily have been overlooked. Grandin’s approach was different however: he concentrates not so much on how the US intervened, but why it does, and how this fits into evolving US foreign and domestic policies more generally. He shows that US intervention has at different times had strong political, economic and even religious motives, with the US often treating Latin America as its ‘workshop’ for new approaches to intervention that it has yet to try elsewhere.

President Daniel Ortega speaks at a rally in Managua, March 21, 2019. REUTERS/Oswaldo Rivas

Hawks in the Trump administration have their sights set on regime change, not because of freedom or democracy, but to ‘settle historic scores.’

It’s been almost 200 years since the US declared that it would allow no more European colonies in the western hemisphere. A 100 years later this was twisted into a declaration that Latin America is exclusively the US’s sphere of influence, giving it a self-proclaimed right to interfere in other countries’ affairs.

A new online reader on the Nicaragua crisis, Live from Nicaragua: Uprising or Coup?, was published in May 2019. Here is one of the articles, which focuses on the role played by social media and the alarming lack of balance both in Nicaragua’s corporate media and in the international press. It makes use of material that has appeared elsewhere in Two Worlds.

In a video clip, a young boy stands at a makeshift roadblock, play-acting something that he must have seen for real on a smartphone or a TV. He holds a toy gun to the head of his friend, who has just been ‘kidnapped’. Off camera, an adult asks, ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘We’ll kill him and leave him naked,’ replies the boy. The adults laugh. This scene from Nicaragua, filmed in one of the dozens of towns paralyzed by roadblocks in 2018, epitomizes the violence that occurred then and the role that social media played in promoting it.

How much has government housing investment been cut since 2010? Headlines at the time reported that it fell by 60% and many people’s impressions are that it has since stayed at something like that level. But as the UK Housing Review has shown by looking at the detailed figures over the last four years, the reality is very different.

Everyone agrees we need to build more homes for social rent and last year the rules were changed so that both Homes England and the London Mayor can help finance them via capital grant. The problem is that the sheer scale of output required – as many as 90,000 new homes per year – means that grant costs will be very high. Over £6 billion would be needed to support a programme of that size. Is there any other way to pay for it?

According to Crisis, to tackle new housing needs and address the backlog of overcrowding, sharing and unsatisfactory living conditions, we need to build 90,000 social rented homes per year in England. Yet currently we struggle to produce 5,000. This means that, far from meeting new needs, we’re not even building enough to replace the social rented homes that are regularly being lost. Theresa May promised to revive social renting “in those parts of the country where the need is greatest” but it’s in these parts where the supply is falling fastest.

Do you remember when housing associations were falling over each other to prove how ‘green’ they were? But since the recession and David Cameron reportedly telling his aides to “get rid of all the green crap” the funding has been cut and the social sector’s priorities have changed. Yet we all know that the linked problems of climate change, over-use of fossil fuels and fuel poverty are now far more urgent. The fact that even newly built homes are leaking so much energy they cost their occupants £200 annually in higher-than-necessary fuel bills shows how many backward steps we’ve taken while the problem has got worse.

It’s taken over five years but the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants has now won an argument that was championed from the start by CIH. Back in July 2013 the housing minister wrote to CIH’s chief executive setting out plans to deter ‘illegal’ immigrants by obliging private landlords to check the passport of anyone applying for a letting. CIH immediately said that it feared the checks would affect people living legally in the UK, because landlords would very likely play safe by discriminating against anyone who couldn’t produce a UK passport. Along with JCWI, we repeated our arguments in the run up to the pilot scheme that took place in the West Midlands. We were assured in October 2014 that discrimination was ‘the most fundamental question’ to be addressed in the official evaluation of the pilot.